Tag: The Ultimate Fighter

If you’ve been following The Ultimate Fighter this season, chances are that, like us, you’ve been more than impressed with the quality of the fights themselves. Four great fights with four decisive (not to mention brutal) finishes have easily outshined most if not all of the petty drama that oft permeates the TUF house, a trend that has only increased since the program’s move to the FX and FOX Sports 1 networks.

In fact, episode 3, featuring the fight between Chris Holdsworth and Chris Beal, similarly drew in just 639,000 viewers. Here’s the thing, episodes 2 and 4 – which featured the female fights of Baszler/Pena and Rakoczy/Modafferi — performed significantly better than those featuring their male counterparts. As Meltzer writes:

For the Ultimate Fighter, there has been an up-and-down pattern in the ratings. As in, the week of a women’s fight, the audience is up. The two women’s fights, airing on Sept. 12 and Sept. 26, did 870,000 and 778,000 viewers live. The men’s fights on Sept. 19 and Oct. 3 did 639,000 and 640,000.

Episode 5 starts off with Grant and Fisette shooting the breeze about still being friends after they fight and all that noise, then switches to Roxanne coping with her loss by bawling her eyes out in the fetal position, then switches to Raquel Pennington discussing what it was like coming out to her parents. Non sequiturs FTW!!

Anyway, Grant is our first featured fighter this week. He speaks in what I like to call “Terry Etim English,” in that I can only understand one out of every thirteen words he says. I think he’s missing his children, but he could just as easily be talking about buying his mum a caravan.

At the TUF house, a few members of Team Tate, including “friends with benefits” aficionado Julianna Pena (Author’s note: I’m a really good listener if you ever need one, Julianna. Just sayin’), start to play truth or dare. I shit you not. The first “truth” that comes up: Who’s the hottest guy in the house? Sarah “Cheesecake” Moras votes for Anthony “Sharkbait” Gutierrez. Pena strongly disagrees, labelling him the ugliest guy of them all. Choose your words wisely, Julianna, because if Gutierrez catches wind of his ugliness he will buwn this whole house to da gwound.

Josh Hill is up next and chooses dare. He is given the challenge of using a cheesy pickup line on Roxanne Modafferi. He chooses “Nice shoes, wanna fuck?” It should be noted that Roxanne is not wearing shoes at the time. She didn’t say “No,” though.

Ronda Rousey is psyched about the matchup, though. “They’re such predictable little pussies,” she says. “[Modafferi's] not gonna be able to bully in, you’ll be able to pick her apart, it’s perfect.” Rakoczy apparently suffered a shoulder injury during her elimination fight, but she’s ready, and Miesha Tate will pay for every smile she smirked.

Modafferi thanks Tate for the fight-selection — in Japanese, obviously — and says she’s not going to underestimate Rakoczy, even though her team (and guest coach Dennis Hallman) are convinced that Modafferi’s got this one in the bag. Vengeful MMA Gods, that’s your cue to enter.

Edmond Tarverdyan mean-mugs Hallman and tries to pick a fight as soon as he sees him. Hallman calls his bluff and offers to settle it right then in the training center. Rousey holds her coach back, then gets in Hallman’s face and throws a “piss fit.” (Miesha’s words, not mine.) Dana White has to come in and play peacemaker, which is kind of an unexpected role for him. I’m sure it’s just that infamous reality show editing, but man, Tarverdyan and Rousey are really coming off like crazy assholes here.

Last night’s episode of The Ultimate Fighter 18 kicked off with some delicious fatness as Coach Miesha Tate delivers treats to last week’s fighters. Her BFF Julianna Pena gets a milk shake and, remembering that she told her how much she loves cake, Miesha brings Team Rousey’s Shayna Baszler some chocolate cake.

Miesha keeps it classy and magnanimous, boys and girls. Though she doesn’t look too happy when Shayna, her former roommate, tells her that Ronda Rousey has won her over a bit.

Julianna doesn’t seem to be making many friends in the house. The underdog won big last week and helped her team, but almost everyone interviewed seems to say that she annoys them.

Maybe it’s the fake British accent she’s adopted and refuses to drop. This week, Julianna’s teammate Chris Holdsworth is taking on Chris Beal, who was chosen by Tate to fight next because he has an injured hand.

Ronda is still furious at the pussy-ass bullshit move and insists that Beal will beat Holdsworth with one hand. Before that can happen, however, Cody meets with Coach Tate and her mascot/assistant coach/boyfriend/manager/suitcase pimp/fellow UFC bantamweight Bryan Caraway to tell them that he believes there’s a mole on their team.

He thinks that it is Julianna. Bryan seems to agree.

Apparently Team Rousey’s Jessamyn Duke guessed all the matchups that Team Tate had laid out as their number one choices. Of course, this means that Julianna, who is friends with Tate and trains with her, told Team Rousey the plan.

Why? Well, she’s already fought so she doesn’t care about what happens to the rest of the team, according to Cody.

When he confronts Julianna with the accusation, which he somehow says isn’t an accusation, she denies it but when others pile on, she suggests that perhaps Roxanne Modafferi, who rooms with Team Rousey ladies, shared the top secret info.

Roxanne flatly denies it and her team jumps to her aid, one of them calling her “a fucking Samurai” who would never stoop so low.

It was the largest increase of a first episode of the season to a second episode in the 18-season history of the show. Only four previous seasons has the second episode had more viewers than the first, almost all in the early days of the show. Some of the gain was due to significant promotion of the show during FOX’s NFL telecasts on Sunday. Other was likely positive word-of-mouth coming from the first episode.

Right Dave, “promotion during NFL telecasts” and “word-of-mouth” were responsible for the increase in TUF 18 viewership. Please, explain to me again what exactly this “NFL” is that you speak of (*shakes head*). The ONLY reasoning behind these numbers is that the audience who tuned in the first week, like myself, instantly fell in love with Miesha Tate and had to come back for more. That being the case, I’d just like to let you all know right here and now that I CALL DIBS (after she leaves Bryan Caraway, which she totally told me she was doing this one time on Twitter).

By now, you probably know (or have heard from an outside, spoilery source) that Julianna Pena scored a massive upset over Shayna Baszler in yesterday’s episode of The Ultimate Fighter 18, choking out the WMMA pioneer in the second round of their scrap. The shocking victory was made all the more impressive by the fact that everyone in the TUF house, every assistant coach, Ronda Rousey, Miesha Tate, Dana White, cameramen 1-3, the Mayor of Television, 4 out of 5 dentists, Bono and the Duke of Lacrosse Team knew that Baszler was all but a lock to win the season, let alone some preliminary fight against a 4-2 nobody.

But no one believed that Shayna Baszler was fighting a certified tomato can more than Shayna Baszler. If that sounds like an insult, it isn’t. The fact is, Baszler was only setting herself up for disappointment with her weigh-in card tricks and chest-puffing statements like “[Pena] doesn’t deserve to be in the same ring with me. She should be coming to my seminars and learning.” Well it looks like THE THUDENT HATH BECOME THE TEACHER, THAYNA. (Ed note: Apologies, I sometime write with a lisp.)

In any case, other MMA websites who aren’t CagePotato were able to secure exclusive access to both Pena’s and Baszler’s TUF 18 blogs (or at least, that’s what we keep telling ourselves) and have passed along their thoughts on what was surely an emotional week on the show for both fighters. Which is where we come in: To highlight the most interesting blurbs from said blogs and punctuate them with the occasional fart joke. God I love my job.

We shall begin with Ms. Baszler’s blog, the somewhat pretentiously titled “Queen’s Manifesto” (courtesy of TheMMACorner). Not only is it the more personal blog of the two, but it also showcases the delusional and often contradictory lengths at which a fighter must sometimes go to justify a loss.

(The front of the card says, “You will die, bitch.” The back of the card says, “But I’ll be in the hot tub tonight around 10 p.m. if you want to hang out, no pressure, I just think you’re cool and you look like you could use a backrub.”)

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a good ringer on The Ultimate Fighter. I’m talking about guys like Roy Nelson or Mac Danzig, who entered the TUF house with literally ten times more experience than some of their cast-mates, and performed like men among boys, cruising to the glass-trophy with shocking ease.

In recent seasons, the talent pool on TUF has dried up to the point where you simply don’t see that kind of fighter anymore; every hot prospect or free agent that’s not immediately snatched up by the UFC gets poached by Bellator or World Series of Fighting, and they don’t have to beat the hell out of near-amateurs on a reality show between sessions of binge-drinking and furniture-abuse.

Of course, since this is the first time that The Ultimate Fighter has featured women, the range of experience in the female bracket is stunning. You’ve got Peggy “Daywalker” Morgan, the 2-0 rookie. Jessamyn Duke, Sarah Moras, and Jessica Rakoczy each have just four pro fights under their belts (and Rakoczy has a losing record). Somehow, these girls are supposed to compete with Shayna Baszler (15-8), who carries over a decade of professional experience with her, and a history of gnarly submissions that include two (two!) wins by twister.

Shayna Baszler was supposed to be the first female ringer in TUF history*. Unfortunately, she knew it just as much as we did, and became convinced that winning the show was a foregone conclusion. She got cocky. She got really cocky. She got really, really, embarrassingly cocky. And she paid for it.

Yes, folks, it’s official, and kind of bizarre: BJ Penn is coming out of his temporary hiatus to coach against Frankie Edgar on the 19th season of TUF (debut date TBA). The two former lightweight champs will face off in a featherweight bout next April. The news was confirmed on this evening’s installment of UFC Tonight. As UFC president Dana White explained, the UFC was originally thinking of putting together Frankie Edgar vs. Urijah Faber as TUF 19 coaches, but the fighters couldn’t agree on a weight class. (Edgar didn’t want to drop down to 135, Faber didn’t want to go back up to 145, and Dana White wasn’t sold on the idea of a catchweight fight.)

So then (as the story goes), BJ Penn randomly calls Dana White and says he wants to fight Benson Henderson (?), as a way to earn his way back to a redemption fight against Frankie Edgar at featherweight (??). Does that plan make tons of sense? Not really. But White was happy to take the opportunity that presented itself, and offered Penn an immediate fight against Edgar if he coached TUF. White also claimed that Penn is super fired up about fighting Edgar again, because his previous losses to Edgar feel like “a pebble in his shoe.”

When he does, Rousey looks relieved. For some reason, she thought that seeing Tate there meant that she herself was being kicked off as a coach. Not sure why she’d assume that, but it just reaffirms that Rousey’s mind is a dark, scary place built to use everything it encounters as anger-inducing motivation. She’s a terrifying, awesome chick.

The reality sets in — Ronda will coach against Mr. and Mrs. Tate on TUF and will rematch Meisha when it’s all over. Rousey seems cool with it, finally, talking of destiny and broken limbs. This season, of course, will feature both men and women bantamweights vying for a UFC contract.

Thirty-two fighters, sixteen of each gender, have been invited to Vegas and will fight their way into the TUF house. First up, is the obligatory former female model turned fighter Jessamyn Duke out of Kentucky winning by triangle choke. The Invicta vet is 5’11 and somehow makes 135 pounds. Nuts.

Next up, David Grant from Britain faces Dominick Cruz’s teammate Danny Martinez. Martinez is desperate for the take down from the get-go. While defending a takedown against the fence, Grant throws a downward elbow to Martinez’ spine and has a point deducted.

Martinez finally gets a takedown near the end of the round but Grant immediately works a triangle choke. Time runs out and Martinez is saved by the bell. The second round starts and Martinez looks gassed.

Grant knocks Martinez down with a punch, then transitions to his back and, as Martinez gets up, Grant knees him to what he believes is the shoulder but what referee Herb Dean calls as an illegal knee to the head. Another point is deducted.